Best eCommerce Marketing Strategies To Improve Your Online Sales & Presence

If you have a high-quality product to sell that is feasible to ship and deliver across the desired region, starting an eCommerce website is the most viable and cost-effective option to build and expand your business. But the question is, would just building a great eCommerce website be enough? With a considerable number of active eCommerce websites operating in UAE alone, it’s safe to assume that things are getting extremely competitive out there. In such a scenario, thinking about how to market your eCommerce website is essential.

To have a superlative online presence and generate maximum revenue with online sales, you need to formulate a long-term eCommerce marketing strategy. The following action plan will help you get a head start.

Define the Sales Cycle

Sales cycle, simply put, is the time period between the visit of users and their conversion. It depends on the type and value of the product or services you’re selling. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of minutes while some sales cycles last for months. Now, why is it important to know how long it takes for a user to convert? 

Defining the sales cycle tells you what platforms you should be focussing on more and what type of retargeting methods you should adopt. Sure, it takes a lot of research and analysis to define a proper sales cycle, but it will come in handy while formulating your future strategies.

Optimize Product Page

When a customer visits your eCommerce website to buy a particular product, he/she is going to want to know everything about it. That’s why it is important to make the product page as detailed and comprehensive as possible. Add everything from color, dimensions and product photos to videos, and product descriptions. This allows a customer to purchase a product with the right specifications, ensuring as few returns as possible. 

Product descriptions not only help the user to comprehend the item they wish to buy, but it also helps your website rank higher on search engine result pages. Having an optimized description is good for SEO, which would consequently elevate your online visibility and presence. Make sure you work on your description with relevant keywords keeping in mind that you’re not only doing this for the users, but also for the search engine bots.

Be Honest

There is no point in hiding or giving misleading information to your customer if you’re looking for long-term sales or recurring visitors. Be upfront and honest about your products, services, deliverables, and extra costs. 

For example, it’s always recommended to mention the shipping charge early on during the sales cycle so that no one abandons the cart during checkout due to a hidden extra charge. Allow users to post their ratings and reviews on product pages and always address negative reviews. This is not only helpful to your customers but you will also be able to gain their trust.

Optimize the Checkout Process

Cart abandonment is one of the most overlooked aspects that directly affect your conversion rate. There is no point in spending so much time and resources to build an eCommerce website if the checkout isn’t proper and effective. 

A good checkout page must drive the user to the payment gateway, give a sense of trust and security to the users,  and make the overall checkout process easy and fast. Customers tend to have a change of mind at the checkout page, mostly because they’re about to spend money, and a checkout page should be able to complete the conversion before they look the other way.

Search Engine Optimization

Even though you make your users happy with a detailed description and honest approach, the search engine bots require a little more. 

Add Structured Markup Language:

Adding a structured markup language, or schema is very effective when it comes to SEO. Schema, “a semantic vocabulary of tags” added to the HTML of your page, helps search engine bots to index your product page properly.

Voice Search Optimization:

Ever since its introduction by Apple in 2011, voice search has been growing in popularity. Studies suggest that by 2020, more than 50% of the searches will be initiated by voice. So, optimizing your eCommerce website for voice search is the next big step you should take. Voice search optimization involves optimizing your website variables for long-tail keywords that might help your website to rank better for voice searches.

Loading Speed Optimization:

No one likes to shop from a slow website, so make sure you don’t keep your customer waiting to load your product pages or payment gateways. Search engines also do not prefer to rank slower websites.  Always keep your page speed under check and you should take all the necessary steps to reduce any additional overhead that’s weighing your website down, which in most cases, are product photos and videos. Make sure you properly optimize your visual assets before uploading, and if possible, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to host them on a separate server.

Retargeting & E-mail Marketing

The customers are not likely to get converted on the first visit, so it’s better to formulate some innovative retargeting campaigns to drive them back to your eCommerce website. Cookies allow you to ‘track’ your visitors across the web, and this enables you to understand their purchase behaviour and pattern. You can select potential customers and retarget them in such a way that it compensates for the reason they didn’t convert in the first place.

For example, let us consider a customer leaving your website because they didn’t find a dress that fits the size. You can send an email to the customer when that product comes back in stock. Else, you can show similar products. Sending reminder emails to unattended carts and showing ads on related platforms are some of the most common and effective remarketing strategies.

You can also send promotional emails to users who haven’t visited your website. Welcoming them with a coupon code or newbie offer will definitely pay off. Email automation techniques like sending confirmations on order placement, payment, and shipping help you gain trust among the customers.

There are tons of eCommerce marketing strategies you could implement on your website. It all depends on what kind of product or service you sell, what is your target audience, and what are your revenue expectations. It requires a lot of research and planning and takes a considerable amount of time to execute. You can either implement them with an in-house team or hire a team of eCommerce marketing experts , depending on the amount of resource you want to spend on it. If done right, there will be a guaranteed increase in your website traffic and sales.